Word: ai
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...cause of the earthquake parents has proven different. Not only do the parents continue to have a vast reservoir of sympathy from ordinary Chinese for their plight, they also have Ai Weiwei, an unusual champion whose determination not to let the issue be buried under bureaucratic obfuscations and strong-arming is - if anything - even greater than their own. On May 5, having steadfastly refused to do so for the past year, authorities released an estimate that 5,335 students died in the quake - a concession that was widely viewed as being forced by Ai's unrelenting campaign and the work...
With his bushy salt-and-pepper hair, scraggly goatee and bohemian airs, Ai Weiwei doesn't fit the mold of earnest human-rights campaigner. But the 52-year-old Chinese artist has made the cause of documenting every child killed in last May's massive earthquake in Sichuan his own. Leveraging his position as one of the country's best-known artists - he had a hand in designing the Olympic Bird's Nest stadium and is the son of China's most prominent modern poet - Ai has managed to help keep the issue of why so many schools collapsed, killing...
...Ai's interest in the issue began when he visited the earthquake zone weeks after the event and saw firsthand the suffering of its victims and particularly of those who had lost children. He began to write extensively about the issue on his blog - already one of the country's most popular - and soon found readers volunteering to help him in an attempt to record the exact number of students who had been killed. It's a project Ai says he will continue until "we find the last name, or I am dead." The way things are going...
...salutary example is Tan Zuoren, a 55-year-old environmentalist and writer who was compiling his own parallel list of dead students. On March 28, he was detained by police in his native city of Chengdu in Sichuan province and hasn't been heard of since. About 20 of Ai's volunteers have faced temporary detention and police harassment as they crisscrossed the quake zone interviewing parents and relatives of the dead, according to Ai, and two have been beaten. The volunteers "are constantly being harassed," Ai says. "But ... the parents who are trying to give us the names...
...Ai's stubborn stance is already having an influence far beyond the narrow issue of the number of dead students. As one 27-year-old volunteer put it, Ai has become a symbol for Chinese concerned about the state of society and its future course. "He makes me realize that it's possible to live as an individual in China," says the native of Liaoning province, who asked for anonymity. "I think the reason why the government is not functioning is because most people have automatically given up their own rights. The role of individuals is to stand...